If you can think of some of the biggest Bollywood / Hindi hit songs from the 1990s, they were all composed by the duo Nadeem & Shravan. Most of their songs were on T-Series (initially) and later on Tips. If you go through YouTube or Spotify playlists, you’ll find Nadeem & Shravan songs dominating at least half the playlist. For a long time, I believed that they were wonderful composers. And then I discovered over time that almost every major hit song they’ve given is plagiarised.
Check this page to get an idea of their plagiarised works. This is not an exhaustive list: http://itwofs.com/hindi-ns.html
You may say, “oh! Come on! Every composer has copied and every composer takes inspiration”. I assume, I’ve done pretty decent survey of Hindi cinema music and I can say that, yes Hindi film composers have routinely copied the tunes or have taken inspirations. But the percentage of their direct tune lifts is not huge. Or they would give a spin to the original songs and make their own. Or just take the flavour of an existing song.
Come to Nadeem Shravan, every major hit song of theirs is a direct copy of another tune.
The tunes are 100% the same.
No modification, no shame!
So, for me two aspects made Nadeem Shravan bad:
- Every other hit song of theirs is a copy
- And each of such songs are direct “note to note” copy of an existing song. Some composers copy just one bar or one line and make their own tune for the rest of the song. Nadeem Shravan would copy entire songs. No change.
Here, I need to make a reference to Anu Malik, who isn’t totally bad. He used to take just one or two lines inspiration and make his own tune for the rest of the song. Some songs, he copied entirely. Many of his hit songs have been his own original compositions. Some of his albums were outstanding. He’s not someone who is ignorant of music. He’s a proper musician , unlike Nadeem Shravan. Anu Malik can compose on the spot. He can make every instrument music in his mouth and hand on the spot. I’m surely writing a post in defence of Anu Malik soon.
Their only talent was to copy from places Indians had no access to. Like their tunes are copied from Middle East, Egypt, Pakistan and other countries’music. So many Pakistani songs were copied and we never realised because Pakistani cinema and music was not easily available in India during the pre Internet days.
Their talent was that they were able to hide all this for more than 2 decades. Their another talent was how they made strong bonds with influential Directors (Like Dharmesh Darshan), Producers and Audio Labels – which ensured that they kept getting films having leading stars like Salman Khan, Sanjay Dutt, Aamir Khan & Shahrukh Khan! Once you have a star in your movie, the chances of your audio sales going up is easy. If you check each year’s audio sales, you’ll notice that the star movie audio comes on top. The good music movie audio sales are somewhere at the 5th or 6th position.
Nadeem Shravan also had a big advantage. By the end 1980s and the beginning of 1990s, most of the big and talented music composers of Hindi cinema from 1960s had become old and were vanishing slowly. But they had a group of musicians who were very well trained. Even these musicians were old and were struggling for wages. Nadeem Shravan made use of these musicians including music arrangers and conductors for their advantage. In film music, the main work of the composers is to make the tune. If this tune is given to the arranger, he does rest of the work! These people were underpaid and were not allowed to make contacts with the big people in the cinema field. So, they stayed poor and with no movies to turn into composers. I would also say that the composers of 1960s and 1970s did not support their musicians / arrangers / assistants to turn into independent composers.
There are very talented composers like AR Rahman, Amit Trivedi, Ram Sampath who can make entire songs from start to finished product. But many of the composers still are the ones who simply make a tune and give it to the arrangers to make the final copy. Nadeem Shravan never composed the tune, nor arranged the score. So, what was the talent they had? Lifting from sources that aren’t known to Indians. And to have great contacts in the Industry.
Nadeem and Shravan were financially strong and had great contacts. This made them get a lot of movies. At a point, the police had made Nadeem as one of the accused in the Gulshan Kumar murder case! He then fled to the UK and stayed there to avoid arrest in India. Nadeem & Shravan were very close to Gulshan Kumar in the initial days. Later they had a fallout. Nadeem probably had underworld links and had conspired in the murder of T-Series owner Gulshan Kumar. Shravan passed away around the Covid time.
Nadeem & Shravan did not stop getting movies even after 2000s. They had some good movies in their hand. But Nadeem was always in UK and this hindered the work. Later, with the influx of new composers in 2000s, they slowly vanished. Even the directors and producers who used to hire them gave flop movies and vanished. Tips & Venus almost lost the race to T-Series and stopped bagging movie rights. Venus has now rebranded as “ishtar music” (not sure of the owners have changed).
There is one interesting trivia. When the movie “sirf tum” composed by Nadeem-Shravan was out for release, this was the time, the police had put Nadeem as one of the accused. The music rights were bagged by T-Series. Every trailer of the movie on tv never carried the name of the composers. If I’m not wrong, even the cassettes didn’t feature their name on the front side! Such was the anger of T-Series on Nadeem Shravan due to their involvement in the murder of Gulshan Kumar.
To conclude, I would say: every time you listen to a song credited as composed by Nadeem – Shravan, just remember they had zero contribution to the song. Someone in the Middle East or Pakistan composed the song, some underpaid arranger and musicians did the rest of the work. They do not deserve to be remembered as musicians. They were just smart and unethical business people who made use of the poverty of Mumbai musicians and the ignorance of people and laziness of directors.
